Qvod is one of the biggest application for streaming and downloading videos in China. There are over thousands of sites that use Qvod as their main source for allowing people to download shows and movies. One of the biggest issues for Chinese people living outside of China is finding a website or a source for watching Chinese shows and movies. Tudou, Youku, Baidu and many other popular video hosting sites in China are banned from the west. It use to be quite easy to access to this content, but the tech companies have been taking action to enforce their copyright laws.

For the last few years, Qvod was the go to place for people in the West to download Chinese videos. Qvod is simple to use. Simply go on a site that supports it and click the movie to stream it. The movie will stream and at the same time download a file in the background that is saved in your hard drive. The application can be used as a desktop video player itself. The application also have an iphone and android app where you can download movies directly from the app to view on your mobile device. Qvod surprisingly is quite fast as well.

After a few lawsuits with some of the movie and video production companies in China, they were forced to shutdown it’s servers. Pirating movies is nothing new in China. Even with Qvod shutdown, there will many other video pirating sites out there. Eventually China’s citizens will come out with something new. A lot of video production professionals in China were complaining that applications like Qvod is hurting their revenue. One spoke out saying that they aren’t making as much money in the movie theaters as they should because people can stream these at home easily and it doesn’t generate them any revenue.

Why don’t Qvod incorporate ads for the production companies like Tudou and Youku? Tudou and youku went through a lot of trouble for their copyrighted videos before, but now the two video streaming giants shaped things up and they are considered fully legit now. Why don’t Qvod do the same? The reason is mainly because Qvod itself is only an application. Meaning that you can think of it as a powerful version of Windows Media Player or Real Player that connects to websites that support their plugin. If you ever visit a site that supports Qvod, you will notice that there are a ton of ads all over the place. The Chinese don’t need to work hard to hide the ads. They are extremely obvious and most of the time unavoidable. Even adblock cannot stop these ads from displaying.

The ads itself does not generate money for the company. These are third party ads implemented by the individual site owners. Qvod continues to operate behind the scene as a legit video player, but the company have plans to reshape their business models by adding preview snippets instead of allowing users to download the whole video. Most of the streaming sites that used Qvod as their main source of video sharing are currently still in operation. Most of the time, these sites just change their domain name each time they are shutdown. Nevertheless, this is still a major impact on the video pirating industry in and outside of China. Where will the foreigners go in order to find the latest movies they want to watch? There isn’t a legit video streaming platform outside of China like Netflix. It’s hard to find native movies from their home country without actually streaming it. I feel that Qvod can enforce their laws within China, but outside of China, people need a way to feel connected back home.

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